Of course, we don’t know whether that is the stage the current market is in. It’s always possible that the bull market is just gathering steam, as economic growth finally kicks in after four years of anemic expansion at best.

But the stock market is not currently cheap, according to any of a number of valuation metrics. And as we approach the five-year anniversary of the bull market beginning in March 2009, the bull is getting rather long in the tooth.

What investors, therefore, are looking for is a basket of all-weather stocks that hold out the prospect of performing creditably in both up and down markets. Ideally, these stocks would rise smartly in the event the bull market continues, and yet lose a lot less than the overall averages in the event a bear market were to begin.

Do such stocks exist? That’s what I set out to discover for this column.

In retrospect, of course, it’s easy to see that such stocks exist. Take Wal-Mart Stores
WMT, +0.30%
which continued to earn a profit throughout the 2008-2009 recession, and whose stock rose 7.7% between the bull-market high in October 2007 and the bear-market low in March 2009 — in contrast to a loss of more than 50% for the broader market.

To be sure, Wal-Mart’s stock has not kept pace with the market since that March 2009 bottom. But it has still nearly doubled, when dividends are taken into account, and is far ahead of the market over the entire period since the October 2007 high.

My guide as I try to find stocks such as Wal-Mart that you might consider in anticipation of another downturn was a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study that identified the unique characteristics of stocks favored by Warren Buffett. The study’s authors found there were five criteria for defining the “cheap, safe, quality stocks” that have served Mr. Buffett so well through thick and thin.

Those five criteria are a below-average price/book ratio, a below-average beta, above-average profitability (defined as the ratio of total profits to assets), an above-average growth rate of that profitability, and an above-average dividend-payout ratio.

The list of stocks below comes from FactSet, which applied these five criteria to the stocks in the S&P 1500 index. The list was pared down even further to include just those that also are recommended by at least one of the Hulbert Financial Digest monitored advisers who have beaten the stock market over the last 15 years.

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